Ah, I remember my first job, where I worked on a huge, legacy C++ project. My first day of work was spent building and fixing linker errors. After that, to test it, I rebuilt everything from scratch, and it took about that long, 30-45 minutes. While waiting for it to build, I wrote my own PHP time tracking system (click when I got in, click again when I went home). Ironically, wasting a day on compiling caused me to save hours worth of work keeping track of hours.
That reminds me of a story that I read ages ago. It happened in the 1980s.
This group of programmers had taken to exercising while waiting for compiles. They were all buff. Then Turbo Pascal came out and they all turned back into couch potatoes. :-)